Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Supreme Court Nominee

We don't know who Donald Trump will nominate. He could go wild card and nominate Peter Thiel or Ted Cruz. More likely, he will nominate someone most of us have not heard of and we will have to rely on legal commenters we trust to decide if we are in favor or not. Previous lists have seemed to include qualified, reliable people.

When McCain seemed to have clinched the nomination for President, I thought to myself "the VP will likely be a governor then, I should familiarize myself with the bench".

So I had read up all of the glowing press reports of how Palin was middle of the road politically, incredibly effective at negotiating tricky pipeline deals with neighboring foreign government agencies that tend to be suspicious of fossil fuels, and not only very effective and popular in her mayorship and later governorship but very obviously a rising star.

The very same outlets and in some cases the very same reporters were trumpeting her extremism, wacky religiosity, inexperience, lack of credentials, and lack of international experience in the days ofter her being named as VP candidate. The space was so flooded with such articles that even searching to find the old ones was difficult (google date restricted search of news seems to still bring up mostly current articles on subjects that have suddenly become controversial).

The point of all of the above is that the signal-to-noise ratio on the background information about the potential supreme court nominees is much greater now than it will be once a specific nominee is named. Then the tune will have changed a lot in all of the first several pages of search results.